Head of Research

Head of Research HEAD OF RESEARCH You'll build and lead the research function at Firecrawl — the team responsible for making our core technology meaningfully better than anything else on the market. That means search, ranking, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training applied to the hardest problems in web data extraction. This isn't a research lab. Everything you build ships to production and runs at scale. You'll start by doing the work yourself, then hire a small team of people who are smarter than you. Salary Range: $200,000–$300,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees. Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your country's cost of living. You can explore how we calculate this here: https://www.firecrawl.dev/careers/compensation.) Equity Range: Up to 0.25% Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10) Job Type: Full-Time Experience: 5+ years in applied research, ML engineering, or search/IR — with production systems at scale Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote ABOUT FIRECRAWL Firecrawl is the easiest way to extract data from the web. Developers use us to reliably convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown or structured data with a single API call. In just a year, we've hit 8 figures in ARR and 90k+ GitHub stars by building the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready data. We're a small, fast-moving, technical team building essential infrastructure super-intelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the research roadmap: Define what Firecrawl needs to build to stay technically ahead — across search, ranking, relevance, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training. You'll decide where we invest research effort and what makes it into production. - Ship research to production at scale: Every project you lead ends with code running in prod, serving real customers at real volume. You'll work closely with the engineering team to make sure research output is production-grade — fast, reliable, and maintainable. - Go deep on search and IR: Build and improve the systems that power how Firecrawl finds, ranks, indexes, and retrieves web content. This is core to the product and core to the moat. You'll own freshness, dedup, query understanding, and incremental indexing at a scale that matters. - Fine-tune and train models: Build and operate training pipelines that improve Firecrawl's extraction quality, content understanding, and data structuring. You know how to get from raw data to a model that moves a metric in production. - Build and lead a high-output research team: You'll start hands-on, then hire 2–4 researchers who are deeply technical and ship fast. You know how to find and attract people who are smarter than you — and how to create an environment where they do their best work. - Collaborate across engineering and product: Research doesn't happen in a vacuum. You'll work with Nick and the engineering team to prioritize research investments that directly improve the product, and with the growth team to understand what customers need. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Someone who has shipped research to production at scale. You've taken research from idea to experiment to deployed system — not once, but repeatedly. You know the difference between a promising result in a notebook and a system that works at production volume with real-world data. You optimize for impact, not publications. Deep knowledge across search, IR, fine-tuning, and model training. You don't just know one corner of ML. You've built search indexes, trained ranking models, fine-tuned LLMs, and operated the infrastructure that supports all of it. You can go deep on any of these and you know how they connect. Experience building and leading small, high-output research teams. You've built research teams at startups — ideally Series A through Series D, in the 10-to-50-person range. You know how to hire well, set direct ... (truncated, view full listing at source)